Not content with synchronizing your phones to make one giant speaker? Researchers at the Tokyo University of Technology have developed "Pinch," an interface that lets you connect multiple devices together to form a giant disjointed display. Although the technology behind the interface remains a mystery — described only as a Wi-Fi based system — a video posted by DigInfo TV shows Pinch in action. To connect two devices, a user simply needs to pinch two adjacent screens together. The screens can be linked together in whatever alignment you choose, as the position and screen size of each display is communicated on a successful pinch. It's not the first time developers have managed to link together multiple smartphone displays, but this is definitely the slickest interface we've seen.

Takashi Ohta, Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Technology, envisions the Pinch interface being used for a variety of apps. "People probably own just one of these devices each. I think people could communicate in fun ways by getting together with friends and putting their devices next to each other." Potential uses include music, advertising, and photo sharing — although depending on how fast the tech is we'd love to see some games take advantage of the interface. The research team is offering Pinch to interested developers and says that several have already taken them up on the offer.

NASA put its obstacle avoidance and vision-based research to the test, by racing an A.I.-In October, NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory pitted a drone controlled by artificial intelligence against a professional human drone pilot named Ken Loo. According to NASA's press release, it had been researching autonomous drone technology for the past two years at that point, funded by Google and its interest in JPL’s vision-based navigation work. The race consisted of a time-trial where the lap times and behaviors of both the A.I.-operated drone and the manually-piloted drone were analyzed and compared. Let’s take a look at the results.NASA said in its release that the company developed three drones; Batman, Joker, and Nightwing. Researchers focused mostly on the intricate algorithms required to navigate efficiently through a race like this, namely obstacle avoidance and maximum speed through narrow environments. These algorithms were then combined with Google’s Tango technology, which JPL had a significant hand in as well. Task Manager of the JPL project, Rob Reid said, “We pitted our algorithms against a human, who flies a lot more by feel. You can actually see that the A.I. flies the drone smoothly around the course, whereas human pilots tend to accelerate aggressively, so their path is jerkier.” As it turned out, Loo’s speeds were much higher, and he was able to perform impressive aerial maneuvers to his benefit, but the A.I.-infused drones were more consistent, and never gave in to fatigue. “This is definitely the densest track I’ve ever flown,” said Loo. “One of my faults as a pilot is I get tired easily. When I get mentally fatigued, I start to get lost, even if I’ve flown the course 10 times.”Loo averaged 11.1 seconds per lap, while the autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles average 13.9 seconds. In other words, while Loo managed to reach higher speeds overall, the drones operating autonomously were more consistent, essentially flying a very similar lap and route each time. “Our autonomous drones can fly much faster,” said Reid. “One day you might see them racing professionally!” infused drone against a human opponent.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Race against the machine : human pilot still beats NASA’s AI by 20% when it comes to fly a drone

This year, for the first time, we conducted an industry-wide survey to establish a comprehensive view of the state of data science and machine learning. We received over 16,000 responses and learned a ton about who is working with data, what’s happening at the cutting edge of machine learning across industries, and how new data scientists can best break into the field. The below report shares some of our key findings and includes interactive visualizations so you can easily cut the data to find out exactly what you want to know. Here are some sample takeaways:

While Python may be the most commonly used tool overall, more Statisticians report using R.

On average, data scientists are around 30 years old, but this value varies between countries. For instance, the average respondent from India was about 9 years younger than the average respondent from Australia.

The highest percentage of our respondents obtained a Master’s degree, but those in the highest salary ranges ($150K+) are slightly more likely to have a doctoral degree.

"The world is beating. Your heart is beating every X seconds, a flower takes Y days to flourish. If a tiger is running at you, your heart beats faster, if the flower receives more sun, it flourishes faster.

Computers so far have been like calculators. You would enter the commands, and get the result. Some fundamental commands got installed in every computer so that humans could enter higher level commands that would then execute lower level commands and produce astonishing outputs with little input.

What has been lacking however, is a synchronization between the computer's beating and the human's beating.

Of course, there is some synchronization already happening, using if trees and sometimes machine learning. But the synchronization is still so superficial that today's computers are basically blind, they force you to get out of your way to enter commands, they aren't aware of what is truly happening.

The future of computers is when they actually understand you, when they understand what humanity cares about.

This is why I started Power. We put chips inside bricks.

Because bricks are everywhere, bricks are where people spend most of their life. If we can turn on the bricks, we can turn on the people, and we can create the infrastructure required for the next wave of technological revolution to happen. With a new mesh of human-machine interactions and brick-to-brick (building-to-building) communication, we can create the future of Internet, decentralized and benefiting from a core understanding of human experience."

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Louison Dumont is back from his blockchain and AI ventures, and it seems he dropped the (his) chains to keep and combine Blocks and AI. Intriguing.

Delphi Automotive said it plans to acquire Boston-based autonomous vehicle software supplier NuTonomy in a deal that could be valued at $450 million.The acquisition, which is expected to close before the end of this year, will nearly double Delphi's 100-plus automated driving team with NuTonomy's 100 employees, including 70 engineers and scientists, the company said in a news release.NuTonomy will continue to operate in Boston, alongside Delphi's team in Boston, as well as in Delphi offices in Singapore; Pittsburgh; Santa Monica, Calif.; and in Silicon Valley in California.Glen De Vos, chief technology officer for Delphi, said the acquisition of NuTonomy allows Delphi access to the commercial truck market."We think this is the tip of the spear for automated driving," De Vos said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "This dramatically accelerates our penetration in this marketplace."

Many US Roads Need To Be Drastically Improved In Order For Self-Driving Cars To Have The Widespread Impact That Many Are Currently Predicting, Argues 3M Global Government Affairs Manager Dan Veoni In A Recent Op-Ed In The Hill.States And Localities Aren’t Making The Investments To Solve This Problem, And The Federal Government Isn’t Stepping In.Public-Private Partnerships Could Provide The Necessary Funding, But They Won’t Spring Up Overnight.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

It will all be about the dialog between vehicles and the infrastructure which supports them

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft may be adding more cars on the road, according to a new study published by the U.C. Davis Institute of Transportation Studies this week. Though the study found that 9% of car owners said they've disposed or one or more of them because of ride-hailing, it's unclear whether it's reduced their total vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

Ride-hailing users who also use public transit have higher personal ownership rates than those who only use public transit.

Ride-hailing has led to a net 6% reduction in public transit use by Americans in major cities (draws people away from buses and light rail, but complements commuter rails).

A majority (49% to 61%) of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all, or by walking, biking, or public transit, likely adding to the total VMT.

“Typically the main problem with software coding .../... is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Software may be eating the world yet nobody understands how...

“When your tires are flat, you look at your tires, they are flat. When your software is broken, you look at your software, you see nothing.”

The latest Apple product unveiling, with its overly-reported Face ID glitch, reminds us that the demo isn’t the product. That can be good or bad.

It’s Full Moon over Cupertino. iPhone X specs leaks ahead of the official presentation and kommentariat inmates howl in their cages. This isn’t new, we’ve long known how psychotoxic Apple products can be, but the phenomenon seems to be reaching a new paroxysm. A few choice examples, starting with the grand prize [no links, no feeding the master baiters]:

The iPhone X proves the Unabomber was right

Steve Jobs gave us President Trump

Apple’s Face ID Could Be A Powerful Tool For Mass Spying

But let’s not lament these and many similar howlers. For Apple, they have a positive side: They attest to the power of the brand, to the magnetism of its products. Well…most of them. I maintain a list of Apple products that remain unmagnetized and fantasize that someday I’ll have a quiet conversation with the DRIs (“Direct Responsible Individual” in Apple’s parlance) in charge of these warts.

But we’ll leave the somber jeremiad for a different day.

The sun is out here in Paris; tomorrow I head to Vézelay and the start of a two day walk along the Camino de Santiago (the pélerinage de Compostelle as it’s known here). So, let’s have fun with Craig Federighi’s iPhone X FaceID demo glitch and, more generally, with the Demo genre. (The full two-hour September 12th keynote video is here.)

Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering — affectionately known as Hair Force One — is an infectiously happy, eager demo-meister. But the demo gods challenged Federighi’s disposition and caused his first attempt to unlock the iPhone X with his face to fail, leaving him staring at the standard unlock code screen.

Fortunately, a back-up phone was at hand — a testament to Federighi’s lack of faith in his own work, or to years of demo hiccups. The stand-in phone worked as expected, and the demo proceeded without further divine retribution.

A counterpoint by Jean-Louis Gassee to last week’s Alphabet/Google/Waymo SD Car winner-take-all thesis. Instead of a moonshot, we’ll see messy, helpful increments. It’s natural selection at work.Last week, I “explained” how Google was set to become the Microsoft of Self Driving (SD) cars. Machine learning leadership, sophisticated simulations and a Central Valley test site, immense computational and financial resources…the Google/Waymo endeavor has secured an insuperable advantage. You’re a car manufacturer: What choice do have but to pay a premium for a Google SD license? You could go with cheaper, less advanced technology…and say goodbye to your company after the first ‘mistake’ on the road.At $1,000 a car, the SD license will be Google’s Mother Lode 2.0, the dream of any tech company looking for a second growth wave.I concluded the article by promising to temper my enthusiasm and to offer a counterpoint, starting with a Horace Dediu quote:“Those who predict the future we call futurists. Those who know when the future will happen we call billionaires.”It’s one thing to predict, as Gordon Moore did in 1965, that semiconductors would double their computing power every 18 months (Moore’s Law, seemingly slower of late). It’s something else to know to invest in Apple’s 1980 IPO (+30,797%) or, even better, Microsoft’s 1986 stock market launch (+73,293%).It feels good to predict the emergence of SD cars: It has to happen because it’d be cool if it did. But when? Betting your company on even an approximate estimate of “Level Five: Full Automation” is a risk that you don’t want to take.

Open Hardware is touted to propel 80% of Facebook Data Center infrastructure, saving them 2Bn$ in the process.

This market, triggered and until recently dominated by hyperscale customers, is growing 30% year on year while the OEM server market declines (-6% y/y).

As Facebook is about to upgrade thousands of OCP machines to keep up with their gigantic CPU power needs, they are expected to offload the previous generation on the market, with unbeatable price/quality ratios as these natively rugged machines will be refurbished, tested, certified before being delivered.

To keep costs at minimum, the sales process is performed 100% online, and the delivery operated by a long standing OCP partner : Horizon Computing Solutions is not only the only distributor of Open Hardware Technology ; they also completed the first Open IT Hardware Product with RuggedPOD, the most power efficent Data Center Worldwide with a PUE = 1.0

Want to test a 16 core Bi-Xeon server ? It will cost you less than $1000 and you can order here.

With sounds from Bach and Chuck Berry to humpback whales and a baby crying, an album used by NASA in the 1970s is set to be publicly released.

The phonograph album — known as "Voyager Golden Record" — originally was launched into space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977. NASA officials at the time hoped the record would be picked up by alien life.

The original album likely still is floating in space as it was made from copper and coated in gold to protect it from space conditions.

The soundtrack is available on SoundCloud, and a CD was released in the early 1990s. Through a Kickstarter campaign, record label Ozma Records gave album copies to those who helped to reach the $1.4 million goal. The album is expected to be released in January.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Of music, space and stars... when NASA launched Golden Records instead of being awarded them :-)

I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You don’t have to read it, and are advised to take caution exploring further.

As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. It gave me access to a lot of things which were totally inappropriate for a young teenager, but it was OK. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally. I have always been a critical proponent of the internet and everything it has brought, and broadly considered it to be emancipatory and beneficial. I state this at the outset because thinking through the implications of the problem I am going to describe troubles my own assumptions and prejudices in significant ways.

One of so-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of attitudes which happens with age, and at some point this question might be a lot less hypothetical. I don’t want to be a hypocrite about it. I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief broadens into attitudes about the role of the internet in public life as whole.

I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. I see kids engrossed in screens all the time, in pushchairs and in restaurants, and there’s always a bit of a Luddite twinge there, but I am not a parent, and I’m not making parental judgments for or on anyone else. I’ve seen family members and friend’s children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK.

But I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down.

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

To begin: Kid’s YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I’ve been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That’s it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Of machine generated content, video, children and complacency : a must read before leaving your kids alone with an iPad...

We’ve developed an approach to generate 3D adversarial objects that reliably fool neural networks in the real world, no matter how the objects are looked at.

Neural network based classifiers reach near-human performance in many tasks, and they’re used in high risk, real world systems. Yet, these same neural networks are particularly vulnerable to adversarial examples, carefully perturbed inputs that cause targeted misclassificatio

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

The spirit of Magritte hides in neural networks : this team has been printing 3D objects that consistently fool machine vision object classifiers. A turtle becomes a rifle, while a cat is consistently recognized as guacamole.

Regina Dugan is leaving her position as the head of Facebook's fledgling consumer-hardware lab, Building 8, raising questions about the company's plans for ambitious initiatives like brain-reading technology and augmented-reality glasses.

Dugan said in a Facebook post on Tuesday that she was leaving to "focus on building and leading a new endeavor," though she didn't specify further.

Dugan joined Facebook 18 months ago from Google's advanced-projects division, which she famously described as a "band of pirates trying to do epic sh--." The move was celebrated at the time as a major coup for Facebook and a sign that the social network was getting serious about building hardware that would compete with Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Building 8 has yet to release a product, but the division is working on an unannounced video-chat device for the home code-named "Aloha" and expected to be released in May, Business Insider previously reported.

A Facebook spokesperson told BI that Bosworth would continue to lead Oculus and Building 8 but declined to say whether the company would seek a replacement for Dugan.

Dugan's time at the helm of Building 8 has not been smooth.

The group has seen several key departures in its short history, including its COO, Richard Wooldridge, its head of consumer experience, Donald Hicks, and its head of product management, Olivier Bartholot, according to people familiar with the matter.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Hardware is never soft nor easy , even when you have enormous ambitions and firepower #HardwareIsNotDead

Hyperloop One just struck a major deal with Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

Virgin Group announced Thursday that it has invested in Hyperloop One, a startup that's working on constructing the high-speed transit system Elon Musk first outlined in a white paper in 2013. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but the investment was significant enough that Hyperloop One will now be called Virgin Hyperloop.

"After visiting Hyperloop One’s test site in Nevada and meeting its leadership team this past summer, I am convinced this groundbreaking technology will change transportation as we know it and dramatically cut journey times," Virgin Group founder Richard Branson said in a press release.

SiFive has taped out and started licensing its U54-MC Coreplex, its first RISC-V IP designed to run Linux. The design lags the performance of a comparable ARM Cortex-A53 but shows progress creating a commercial market for the open-source instruction set architecture.

A single 64-bit U54 core delivers 1.7 DMIPS/MHz or 2.75 CoreMark/MHz at 1.5 GHz. It measures 0.234 mm2 including its integrated 32+32KB L1 cache in a TSMC 28HPC process using a 12-track library.

A quad-core complex with a 2-MByte shared coherent L2 cache, Gbit Ethernet and DDR3/4 controllers and other peripherals measures ~30 mm2. SiFive will deliver a quad-core chip that includes an E51 management core that will ship in the first quarter on boards targeting software developers.

The single-issue, in-order U54 is expected to lag the performance of ARM’s dual-issue A53. By comparison, in late 2014 Freescale (now NXP) announced the QorIQ LS1043A, a midrange quad-core A53 running at 1.5 GHz delivering more than 16,000 CoreMarks at 6 W.

SiFive believes its part will be competitive in power and area efficiency. It also aims to innovate in its business model.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft want more control over the internet’s basic infrastructure

ON SEPTEMBER 21st Microsoft and Facebook announced the completion of a 6,600km (4,100-mile) cable stretching from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. Dubbed Marea, Spanish for “tide”, the bundle of eight fibre-optic threads, roughly the size of a garden hose, is the highest-capacity connection across the Atlantic Ocean. It is capable of transferring 160 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of more than 5,000 high-resolution movies.

Such ultra-fast fibre networks are needed to keep up with the torrent of data flowing around the world. In 2016 international bandwidth usage reached 3,544 terabits per second, roughly double the figure in 2014. Firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft used to lease all of their international bandwidth from carriers such as BT or AT&T. Now they need so much network capacity to synchronise data across their networks of data centres around the world that it makes more sense to lay their own dedicated pipes.

This has led to a boom in new undersea cable systems. The Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, reckons that 100,000km of submarine cable was laid in 2016, up from just 16,000km in 2015. TeleGeography, a market-research firm, predicts that $9.2bn will be spent on such cable projects between 2016 and 2018, five times as much as in the previous three years.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

After DataCenter infrastructure (through OCP open-source hardware), Tech companies drill down further the value chain and hit sea bottom with fiber. Software is indeed eating the world yet leads to hardware...

Google has announced it’s acquiring a $1.1bn chunk of HTC’s smartphone business, and with it providing the once leading Taiwanese phone brand a much needed lifeline. But what does Google want with part of a smartphone business?Google isn’t buying the whole of HTC, just a relatively large part of the Taipei-based company’s smartphone business and not its Vive virtual reality headset business. Google gains half of HTC’s research and development team – about 2,000 people – and a non-exclusive license for HTC’s intellectual property, allowing it to take advantage of some of HTC’s advances in smartphone technology.HTC gets a cash injection, which will help it survive in some very competitive markets, and Google gets to continue its “big bet on hardware” according to Rick Osterloh, the company’s senior vice president for hardware.It’s “a business decision to have access to one of the best R&D teams”, said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research. But it’s also “a sort of emotional decision to save its close partners”.Little history of hardwareWhile Google is the creator of the Android operating system, which is now used on more than 2bn devices a month, or 89% of mobile devices according to IDC, it has only dabbled with making its own smartphones and tablets. It routinely partnered with firms such as HTC, LG and Huawei to make the Nexus series of a devices, which sold in low volumes and acted as showcases for each new version of Android.Google bought Motorola in 2011 for $12.5bn (£9.24bn), and while it ran it as a separate company selling smartphones aimed at the low end, the acquisition was really about a large stock of important patents.“Its main reasoning was to acquire Moto’s patent portfolio so as to protect against Apple (and Microsoft) while also providing stiffer competition to Samsung (although Google would never admit this),” said David McQueen, research director at ABI Research.Google sold Motorola to China’s Lenovo in 2014 for $2.9bn without the collection of patents.

Earlier this week, Tesla remotely upgraded select Florida Tesla owners’ cars to expand their mileage capacity in an effort to ease and assist with Hurricane Irmaevacuation efforts. The move was praiseworthy and appropriate, but at the root of the gesture lies a terrifying prospect of our automotive future.

Tesla briefly sold a 60 and 60D trim level of its Model S and Model X vehicles. These models had 75 kWh battery packs installed, but were software limited to have less range to artificially create a more affordable entry-level tier for buyers. Buyers still had the option to upgrade to the full capacity for a charge if they changed their minds, and Tesla would “unlock” the capability via an over-the-air software update.

With category four Hurricane Irma headed straight for Florida, Tesla unlocked the full capacity of 60 and 60D model owners in Florida to give them about a 30 mile range boost while evacuating. It was genuinely helpful and an extremely savvy public relations move for the company.

But what it also previewed is our imminent future of unprecedented corporate control over how we drive and what we drive. I briefly mentioned it in the article yesterday, but it’s not hard to imagine a worst case scenario where a company or corporation becomes a critical decision maker in disaster scenarios, like with Hurricane Irma, out of consumer and government control in a critical moment.

Now, I’ve never been one to play into the fears of autonomous driving or ridiculous theories of car hacking, though I recognize vehicle computer security as one of the most important developments in the automotive industry going forward. But this issue is concerned with the relationship between the company and the company’s product.

What would happen if Tesla didn’t unlock the range of those cars? It’s not likely that any of the owners would become stranded, as Electrek reported most of Tesla’s charging network was still functional at the time. But that could have easily been the scenario, and then we face a situation where people were physically capable of evacuating sooner but limited by an option box they didn’t check. We now face a reality where we know our vehicles may hold more potential than we have access to, and that gets complicated in life or death scenarios

.../...

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Interesting story reminding us that, like a Patek Philippe, you don't fully own a Tesla ; unlike a Patek Philippe however, there are software upgrades in a Tesla and they are not only triggered with an extra payment...

Philippe Dewost has been appointed director of Leonard, VINCI's new Group-wide innovation and foresight platform. He took up his duties on 1 September and reports to Pierre Coppey, Executive Vice-President of VINCI.

Philippe Dewost, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm), is a Corps des Mines engineer and holds an MBA from the Collège des Ingénieurs.

He is a co-founder of Internet service provider Wanadoo and notably re-launched Orange France Telecom's home devices business.

He also served as CEO of imSense ltd, a British startup based in Cambridge. The company, which was acquired by Apple in 2010, developed and patented one-of-a-kind imaging technologies that are now used more than 500 million times a day across most Apple products.

Starting in 2011, Philippe Dewost headed the Digital Economy section of the Investments of the Future Programme at Groupe Caisse des Dépôts (CDC). At the end of 2015, Philippe Dewost also launched LaBChain, a CDC Blockchain initiative.

Philippe Dewost was the prime mover behind La French Tech, the government's French startup ecosystem initiative, and is also Honorary President of the Centre des Hautes Etudes du Cyberespace (CHECy).

"Philippe has more than 20 years of experience in Internet and mobile ecosystems within large tech and telecoms groups and startups. This expertise will be of invaluable help in developing Leonard, the new VINCI open laboratory focused on the future of cities and infrastructure," said Pierre Coppey, Executive Vice-President of VINCI.

"With Leonard, VINCI is offering me a chance to contribute to the digital transformation of durable structures and move from bytes to concrete. I am honoured and proud to have this opportunity to work with them over the long term to write the digital record of the builders," said Philippe Dewost in taking up his new position.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

With Leonard, VINCI is offering me a chance to contribute to the digital transformation of durable structures and move from bytes to concrete. I am honoured and proud to have this opportunity to work with them over the long term in order to pave the digital trace of builders #BuildTech #ConcreteTech

When a magazine challenged a technology company to use AI to pick 50 unheard of companies that were set to flourish, the experiment yielded dramatic results.

In 2009, Ira Sager of Businessweek magazine set a challenge for Quid AI's CEO Bob Goodson: programme a computer to pick 50 unheard of companies that are set to rock the world.

The domain of picking “start-up winners” was - and largely still is - dominated by a belief held by the venture capital (VC) industry that machines do not play a role in the identification of winners. Ironically, the VC world, having fuelled the creation of computing, is one of the last areas of business to introduce computing to decision-making.

Nearly eight years later, the magazine revisited the list to see how “Goodson plus the machine” had performed. The results surprised even Goodson: Evernote, Spotify, Etsy, Zynga, Palantir, Cloudera, OPOWER – the list goes on. The list featured not only names widely known to the public and leaders of industries, but also high performers such as Ibibo, which had eight employees in 2009 when selected and now has $2 billion annual sales as the top hotel booking site in India. Twenty percent of the companies chosen had reached billion-dollar valuations.

To contextualize these results, Bloomberg Businessweek turned to one of the leading “fund of funds” in the US, which has been investing in VC funds since the 1980s and has one of the richest data sets available on actual company performance and for benchmarking VC portfolio performance.

The fund of funds was not named for compliance reasons, but its research showed that, had the 50 companies been a VC portfolio, it would have been the second-best-performing fund of all time. Only one fund has ever chosen better, which did most of its investments in the late 1990s and rode the dotcom bubble successfully. Of course, in this hypothetical portfolio, one could choose any company, whereas VCs often need to compete to invest.

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